Today, all of those exceptions have made way for a generation of women athletes to come pouring through that shattered glass ceiling—and these women are pushing the sports world, and culture in general, forward with abandon.

Just having women athletes to look up to was enough for some of these women to pursue sports themselves. When Suni Lee was 6, she watched clips of the 2008 U.S. Olympic gymnastics team endlessly, then tried to mimic the moves she saw at home. “I started breaking stuff and doing flips on the bed, and finally my mom got sick of it and just put me in gymnastics,” says Lee. Today she has six Olympic medals, including an all-around gold in Tokyo.

Those same ’08 Games are a vivid memory for heptathlete Anna Hall. Since her dad coached track and field, Hall and her sisters gathered around excitedly to watch every event. They saw a young Allyson Felix shine, but another moment caught her attention, too: when Lolo Jones, the favorite for the 100-meter hurdles, clipped a hurdle and lost her lead, missing out on the podium altogether. “I think seeing everyone’s reaction to something bad happening at the Olympics made me realize how big it was,” Hall says.

And that bigness called to her. “That was when I was first like, O.K., this is what I want to do. I’m gonna go there. It just felt really important.” She was only 7 at the time, but this past summer, at 23, Hall made that dream come true in Paris, representing Team USA in the heptathlon.

When Jordan Chiles was first starting in gymnastics, she idolized Shawn Johnson and was told she could be the next Gabby Douglas. Before long, she was competing alongside some of her idols. “I was the youngest national team member, so I was able to see the dedication and passion they brought to the sport,” Chiles says. She has been embraced by the older generation and pushed the new generation forward, as a two-time Olympic medalist with a flair for tattoos and pop music. Her collegiate floor routines have become consistently viral videos, and in March she was named one of Time’s Women of the Year.

While earlier generations of women athletes often had to hide their love for sports or their burgeoning athleticism because even their own families would call it unladylike, Gen Z athletes were often raised by parents who wanted to enjoy sports with their kids. Freestyle skier Eileen Gu’s mom first put her in ski school at Lake Tahoe when she was 3. “Mom really loved to ski, so she would drive four hours away to Tahoe,” says Gu. “And I’m an only child, so she thought ski school was better than babysitting, because I got to be athletic and socialize with other kids.” Her mom gets to ski a lot more now, because she accompanies Gu, 21, around the world while she competes. This year, Gu, who has two Olympic gold medals, added to her haul by capturing her 18th World Cup event, making her the winningest free skier ever—woman or man.

Cameron Brink, the No. 2 pick in the 2024 WNBA draft, knew basketball was a possible career path long before she started playing at age 12. Brink’s mother worked at Nike, bringing in the first era of female basketball players to the brand. “You can feel a shift, when you have those women to look up to,” says the Los Angeles Sparks forward. “Playing basketball for a living is a huge privilege, but none of this would have happened without the women before us.”

As the children of two professional tennis players, Nelly Korda and her two older siblings were encouraged to be athletic. “I started playing sports when I started walking, it’s just always something I’ve done. But our parents didn’t want us to feel like we had to play tennis, they wanted us to find what we were passionate about,” Korda says. It was her older sister Jessica’s interest in golf that got Korda and the rest of the family on the green. “Golf was a game we could all do together. You can be chill and have fun, and then if you are serious it can be intense,” she says. Soon enough, Korda followed in her sister’s footsteps and took golf very seriously, joining the LPGA tour at age 18. Today, she’s the top-ranked women’s golfer in the world.

Becoming an elite athlete wasn’t on Gabby Thomas’s radar as a child. But she was encouraged by her mom to try any sport she wanted: horseback riding, basketball, tennis, gymnastics and soccer. “Sports became a strong part of my identity and shaped who I am,” Thomas says. Ultimately her speed got her a scholarship to Harvard, and ultimately a professional and Olympic career.

Raised in Florida, Caroline Marks was most comfortable in the ocean. She also loved to hang out with her older brothers. So when they learned to surf, she followed. She won her first big trophy at an amateur competition in California. “I just remember getting this big trophy and thinking, This is the best thing ever. I just did what I love to do the most and regardless of where this is going to go, I just never want to stop doing this. Surfing is gonna be a part of my life forever,” she says. So far, the 2024 Olympic gold medalist has continued to find that joy and success on the waves.

Ali Truwit grew up in the water, too. But for her, it was a pool in Connecticut. She was a swim team kid who was constantly surrounded by competitive swimmers, some of whom would become Olympians. “I would always use them as inspiration,” Truwit says. The joy she felt in the water is what kept her training, which ultimately secured her a spot on Yale’s swim team. Just days after her college graduation, though, a shark attacked her and a friend while they were snorkeling and Truwit became a lower-leg amputee. But the empowerment and joy she’d found in the pool helped her embrace her body. “There were all these unknowns about what life without a limb is like, but swimming was such a valuable tool for me, because it was something that I could reclaim,” she says. Just a year after her accident Truwit was competing at the highest level—winning two medals at the 2024 Paralympics.

When Toni Breidinger was a kid in northern California, she tried gymnastics, piano and a bunch of other activities, but nothing really stuck. When her dad saw a billboard on the side of the road in Sonoma advertising a racetrack, he thought he would take Toni and her twin sister, Annie, to try a go-kart class. She was immediately hooked. They raced go-karts until Toni was 15, when she started to get opportunities to try out race cars. The thrill of driving, and winning, kept her moving up through the sport. Today, Breidinger holds the record for the most top-10 finishes in any NASCAR circuit by a woman, with 27.

The women athletes coming up today are fully cognizant of how far the sports world has come, and how far there still is to go toward gender equality. 

In the traditionally male-dominated world of professional surfing, Marks got to compete in the first event to offer equal prize money for the men’s and women’s winners, at the 2019 Boost Mobile Pro in Australia. “I used to go out and there used to be hardly any girls just surfing, but now it’s like just as many girls are out there as guys,” she says. 

The same thing is happening in other sports, as women’s purses catch up to men’s. But these athletes are anything but content, and it’s about more than money. Korda wants to see women’s golf on prime-time TV. Breidinger is hosting events for girls to get more women drivers to join her in NASCAR—she’s the only one in the Craftsman Truck Series this year, out of 35 drivers. And Truwit hopes the representation for amputee athletes increases with the explosion in coverage of women athletes in general. “The more you see people with differences doing these amazing things, the more you can see yourself in those places, too,” she says. “There’s still so much room to grow.”

Last June, Brink tore her ACL, ending her rookie season early. But undergoing surgery and doing rehab for the better part of a year gave her time to think about the WNBA in a big-picture way. “None of this would have happened without Sheryl Swoopes and all those women who came before. My rookie class, we say the same thing: We want the girls after us to have it even better,” says Brink.

How? Brink has her eye on salary increases and better benefits. And since endorsements are where most players make significant money, she hopes more diverse players get the kind of recognition she and her peers have. “Where are the endorsements for [the vets]?” says Brink. “Especially my teammates that are Black, that are gay, that use they/them pronouns. There’s a privilege that some of the rookies have in being younger and coming in at a good time, and a privilege of looking a certain way. There are women in the league that deserve more recognition, it’s just that simple: They deserve more.”

Women athletes dominated headlines and medal podiums last summer in Paris, a trend that has been brewing for the past several Olympics. In 2024, women made up 50% of the athletes at the Games for the first time in history. But the gymnasts and track stars there, who usually get their moment on a Wheaties box once every four years, also started to notice a more sustained interest than before. 

Thomas, who was featured heavily in Netflix’s docuseries Sprint in the lead-up to the Games and then went on to win three gold medals in Paris, sees this momentum as fuel (a public health professional, she also works part-time at a volunteer health clinic in Austin, Texas, where she trains). “It’s so helpful and motivating for me to be in an era of sport like this, where women have so much purpose and we’re fighting for so much more than just what’s on the field or the track,” Thomas says. “It’s about making a difference to increase access and equity in our sport. That’s such a great moment to be part of.”

Lee and Chiles embody the change in what it means to be a gymnast today. When Lee was first starting out, she was shocked by how serious competitions were. Strict, abusive coaching styles were all too common, and the athletes were forced into harmfully rigid ideas about their bodies and how they should look. Few gymnasts had careers once they went through puberty.  “Being a gymnast in a lot of people’s eyes was a white girl with a ponytail and I didn’t look like any of them,” says Chiles.

In the past decade, however, national team members have bravely spoken out about the abusive coaching and environments they experienced, and the U.S. team has gotten older, stronger, healthier and more competitive. “I’m definitely stronger now than I was when I was younger,” Chiles says. “And I’ve accepted the fact it’s O.K. to be older in this sport.” Fans certainly have embraced that. At the Paris Games Lee says she felt like a rock star. “It was just the best feeling in the world to see that people actually cared about it,” she says.

The freedom, joy, and support enjoyed by today’s U.S. gymnasts has undeniably made the sport more fun to watch, and Lee wants that for all women athletes. “I feel like right now women are dominating in sports,” she says. “It’s such an amazing thing to see and it’s so exciting to watch. I feel like it can only get better from here.”